Category Archives: Classical Education

Now we know that computers don’t help children learn and that drugs don’t help them concentrate, because the establishment mandarins who sold us the computers and drugs have conceded failure. In the January 29 New York Times, a prominent professor of child development shows that attention-deficit-disorder drugs only harm the three million children who take them. One out of 10 American children have been diagnosed with so-called Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and most of them have been medicated.

Some months ago, the Times reported that test scores lagged in school districts that invested massively in digital education. It does not seem to have occurred to the mandarins that computers cause attention deficit disorder. The brain is a machine, in the enlightened secular model, and so-called brain science teaches us to tweak its functioning with pharmaceuticals, or stimulate its development through digital approximations of intelligence. The grand result of a generation’s worth of brain-science application is a generation of schoolchildren who are disproportionately illiterate, innumerate, anxious, angry, and unhappy.

Professor L Alan Sroufe’s debunking of ADD medication in the New York Times contains this admission:

”Back in the 1960s I, like most psychologists, believed that children with difficulty concentrating were suffering from a brain problem of genetic or otherwise inborn origin. Just as Type I diabetics need insulin to correct problems with their inborn biochemistry, these children were believed to require attention-deficit drugs to correct theirs. It turns out, however, that there is little to no evidence to support this theory.”

That is an astonishing statement: in the mainstream view of the academic psychologists, the brain is another pancreas, except that its function is to secrete thoughts as opposed to insulin. That is to say that the psychologists have a pancreas where their brains should have been.

One really wants to light a torch and march on Frankenstein’s castle, also known as the psychology profession. Until the passage of the 2005 Individuals with Disabilities Act, schools had the power to force children to take ADD drug, namely amphetamines, or bar them from classrooms, even when parents objected to the medication. I don’t know how many children were harmed by the sorcerer’s apprentices in school psychology offices, but the new research might provide grounds for some exemplary lawsuits. It turns out that the mainstream was dominated by cultists and loonies. The religious day schools, the home-schoolers, alternative schools like the Waldorf movement turn out to have been islands of sanity in a sea of delusion.

The psychologists of the 1960s also advocated instant gratification in all aspects of life, particularly sex, with the silly presumption that all individual and social problems were to be blamed on suppressing our urge to be gratified. Once children had limitless opportunities for gratification, abetted by ever-more-realistic (and ever-more violent and perverse) computer simulations, the psychology profession observed that attention spans shortened drastically, and presumed that a genetic deficiency was to blame. It sounds like bad science fiction, but it is standard operating procedure in every public school in the United States.

Learning how to learn is the point of education. We will forget the great majority of specific things we were taught: Euclidean proofs, the polynomial theorem, Roman emperors, French grammar, atomic weights, the poems of Browning, and whatever else was stuffed in our heads as schoolchildren. What we learned, if we learned anything, is to memorize, analyze and explain. If we know geometry, algebra or French today, it is not because we retained our knowledge but because we re-learned the subject. School, in short, taught us to concentrate. The most successful people are not the cleverest in terms of sheer processing power, but those who multiply cleverness with persistence.

The psychology profession, by contrast, thinks that the brain is a machine, and the best way to engage it is to use another machine, namely a computer. Computers, to be sure, do not kill brains; people kill brains with computers. Computers in the hands of people who believe that gratification is the highest human goal, and the quicker the gratification, the better, have devastated our mental landscape. Our children do not read; they only surf. They do not write; they only text. They do not plan and strategize in games; they react to visual and aural stimuli while inflicting simulated mayhem. They do not follow a plot: they cut among disjoined images in the style of rap videos. And when they fail to concentrate, we give them Adderall and Ritalin.

It is mouth-foaming, howling-at-the-moon madness, and it is our mainstream culture. The wired classroom hasn’t worked, so the educational establishment recommends more of the same quack cure. The New York Times reported last September that computerized education has produced no measurable results, except for some negative ones (test scores fell after massive investment in computers). Yet the education gurus remain undeterred. ”The data is pretty weak. It’s very difficult when we’re pressed to come up with convincing data, ”Tom Vander Ark, the former executive director for education at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation told the Times. Reporter Matt Richtel wrote: ”And yet, in virtually the same breath, he said change of a historic magnitude is inevitably coming to classrooms this decade: ‘It’s one of the three or four biggest things happening in the world today.”’

The obsession with digital classrooms goes back to president Bill Clinton, who called for more computers in the schools in 1997. After 15 years of failure, the Barack Obama administration’s National Education Technology Plan ”calls for applying the advanced technologies used in our daily personal and professional lives to our entire education system to improve student learning.”

The American elite, to be sure, does not subject its own offspring to this kind of digital treatment. New York City’s most exclusive private schools, the ones with an acceptance rate lower than Ivy League colleges, do things the old fashioned way. Brearley School, sometimes considered the best of the private schools for girls, requires every student to learn an instrument and play in the orchestra (the only other New York school with this requirement is the Rudolf Steiner School). The Dalton School teaches chess to every student. Acoustic instruments, classical music, and ancient games with wooden pieces teach concentration span.

In Silicon Valley, Times reporter Matt Richtel observed in an October 22 feature, many of the Silicon Valley types who make weapons of mass dementia send their own kids to a school that bans computers until the 9th grade:

The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard. But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home. Schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers, and many policy makers say it is foolish to do otherwise. But the contrarian point of view can be found at the epicenter of the tech economy, where some parents and educators have a message: computers and schools don’t mix.

That is the local Waldorf school, part of an education movement founded by the German mathematician and mystic Rudolf Steiner. Some of Steiner’s ideas were strange, but his educational method – learning by doing – is robust. At the New York Steiner School my children attended, for example, 8th-graders learned the Renaissance by making copies of 16th-century scientific instruments, singing four-part Renaissance vocal works, and staging a play about the 17th-century physicist Johannes Kepler. The 9th-graders studied Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” by staging the complete play, rotating the cast so that every child memorized a couple of hundred lines. Waldorf schools require parents to promise to forbid television to their children in any form through elementary school.

At a showcase classroom in Arizona’s most wired school district, Matt Richtel reported,

A seventh-grade English teacher roams among 31 students sitting at their desks or in clumps on the floor. They’re studying Shakespeare’s As You Like It – but not in any traditional way. In this technology-centric classroom, students are bent over laptops, some blogging or building Facebook pages from the perspective of Shakespeare’s characters. One student compiles a song list from the Internet, picking a tune by the rapper Kanye West to express the emotions of Shakespeare’s lovelorn Silvius.

Somehow, I don’t think that’s what Shakespeare meant by “as you like it.” Web access in this case is simply a pretext to help seventh-graders to reduce Shakespeare to their own level, rather than allow Shakespeare to lift children up to his.

The Waldorf movement diverges radically from the mainstream. It tends to recruit crunchy-granola rebels against urban civilization who love acoustical instruments and handicrafts, as well as philosophy graduates of major universities with a deep interest in metaphysics. Some of the classical curriculum of the German Gymnasium of a century ago is preserved as if in amber. And the fact that so many of the Masters of the Universe of the digital age send their children to this countercultural throwback is a fair gauge of the degradation of mainstream learning.

Adderall and Ritalin, by the way, can’t be found in any Chinese pharmacy (although expatriates can find small amounts of Ritalin at a couple of locations in Shanghai). It appears that Chinese children, who must memorize several thousand characters in order to complete elementary education, do not suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder. Two-thirds of Chinese children graduate secondary school, which involves a grueling exercise in memorization. As I reported earlier in this space, 50 million Chinese children are studying Western classical music (see China’s six-to-one advantage over the US, Asia Times Online, Dec 2, 2008). That’s the same number of children aged 5 to 17 in America. Nothing builds attention span better than playing classical music. Granted that much of China’s educational system teaches rote memorization, and that the majority of Chinese may not receive top-quality schooling, it is still the case that the absolute number of Chinese kids mastering high-level skills is a multiple of the American number.

America is the greatest country in the world, a unique and blessed land, while China remains under the rule of an authoritarian regime that alternates between benign and brutal. But we Americans have consigned our children to the purveyors of an alien ideology – the absurd doctrine that the brain is a machine – with consequences so devastating that the liberal establishment itself no longer can defend its core policies of the past half century. Worst of all, we have papered over our spiritual deficit by doping millions of our kids with amphetamines.

If China replaces us at the pre-eminent world power, it will happen because their children are smarter, more persevering, more ambitious and tougher than ours. And we will have no-one to blame but ourselves for handing our kids over to quacks and snake-oil salesmen.

Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman, president of Macrostrategy LLC. His book How Civilizations Die (and why Islam is Dying, Too) was published by Regnery Press in September 2011. A volume of his essays on culture, religion and economics, It’s Not the End of the World – It’s Just the End of You, also appeared recently, from Van Praag Press.

It has been said in various contexts that you can’t make a good omelet with rotten eggs. Along the same lines, C.S. Lewis stated that no matter how much or how good the wine is, if you pour it into a mud puddle, you still have a mud puddle. Jesus Himself referred to the same kind of predicament, i.e. wasting something valuable on an unworthy or unready recipient. He called it “casting pearls before swine.”

Classical, Christian education is a valuable commodity and to gain the fullest possible benefit from it, students need to come to it with a home-developed foundation. Put another way, there are certain intrinsic characteristics of the families whose students do well in this kind of education. When these characteristics are absent, it is very likely that in spite of the best efforts of the school and teachers, the student will gain little. The following is not intended to be the exhaustive compilation of those characteristics, but they should serve as examples to illustrate the point. The order of their presentation is rather random, since they all relate.

“Moral training” is the big “E” on the eye chart of prerequisite characteristics. Put even more plainly, children coming from homes where God’s Word is honored and obeyed will see a profound similarity in the expectations at school regarding their behavior. Homes that identify sin as sin, expect cheerful obedience, show love and forgiveness consistently will find the school’s standards will reinforce those biblical principles.

But how does that kind of training practically look at school? What are some even more precise evidences of a firm foundation that enables a student to get the most out of the school’s program? One very obvious evidence is the student’s view of authority in general, and his parents’ authority in particular. A good measure of the student’s regard for authority is the love boys show to their mothers, and the respect girls display for their fathers. Listen to how students talk; if the subject of parents comes up at all, it takes very little astuteness to determine the health of the student’s view of his parents.

Another related characteristic is old-fashioned etiquette or manners. In the past, good manners were referred to as the “oil” of maintaining good relations with others in public. It is not a sin, per se, for a boy not to hold the door for a girl, but it is probably an indicator that his training in being a gentleman is not complete. The way a child speaks to an adult, the way he sits or slouches in his desk, and other numerous little acts that show respect for others, especially the elderly, speak volumes about that student.

A firm foundation also shows up in the way a student “filters” the plethora of cultural messages. Is there evidence of growing biblically-based discernment, or does the student generally accept almost every attractive, popular theme at face value? Legalistic rejection is not biblical discernment any more than is a wide-eyed, “I-wanna-be-hip” attitude. Biblical discernment takes a lot of study, time, and a willingness to stand alone at times. “Wise as serpents, innocent as doves” sums it up quite well.

A student’s appearance billboards both his respect for others and his family’s training in discernment. Even in the secular world, appearance is recognized as the message-sending device it is. Dress should not be THE means to determine success, but it is a lie to tell children that it doesn’t matter at all. Even young children understand the difference “dressing up” makes in how they are to regard their activity. All little girls want to look pretty at a wedding, and all young boys want to wear their team uniform with pride. A student who supposedly doesn’t care about his appearance actually cares too much for himself and not enough for those who have to see him. This attitude profoundly affects his teachability.

A firm foundation provides a student with a solid work ethic, i.e. standards of doing a job well. This goes beyond just being honest and not cheating on the test. Doing their work “as unto the Lord” practically means they don’t have a “is-this-going-to-be-on-the-test?” mentality toward the acquisition and value of knowledge. Most often the students with a strong work ethic, who sweat bullets for every B they get, will fare far better in the adult world than those gifted students who breezily accept their A’s.

Finally, parents will improve their students’ opportunity to gain much from a classical, Christian education by ensuring that they (the parents) understand, value, and teach the purpose of this education. It is not enough to send the kids and pay the tuition – the parents must be able to articulate the reasons they are doing this and help their children understand it as well. Otherwise it will only be one more program dad and mom sign their kids up for, like summer swimming or piano lessons. Do you want this type of education for your grandchildren? If not, or if it doesn’t make any difference to you, then consider going with something cheaper and easier. If so, than it must be understood to be valuable by your children. They will pass on only what they value, for all else will drop away with the passing of their parents’ generation.

How firm is the foundation? As we look at the students here at Logos, there are evidences of many, many deeply sunk pillars; may God be pleased to allow us all to build upon them well.

1) When is the best time to make the shift from homeschooling to school?

The “best time” for this important move will vary from child to child, even within a family. We recommend the earlier the better for boys, since they benefit from being away from mom, in order to learn to stand on their own. They also mature slower than girls in most areas, so this is obviously a tough, parental call. A good rule of thumb is to visit and observe the grade your child may go in to help you determine his readiness and compatibility.

From the school’s standpoint, there are some important transition points that we recommend for an easier transition. It’s usually easier to go from a homeschool and enter (as appropriate) the first grade, third grade, or fifth grade. At the secondary, we strongly recommend either a seventh or ninth grade entrance. In some classical schools, however, entering ninth means missing logic. We do not recommend entering later than ninth grade due to the academic speciality and level of difficulty.

2) How can we help our child prepare for the school routines?

Put simply, the biggest difference your child may notice is that school has more “rules” than home. So, to prepare for school, it would be a good idea to have your child practice raising his hand to ask questions or make a comment, keeping his eyes on his own paper, putting materials neatly back in the same place each time, getting to work without lots of questions, finishing work in a set length of time, and taking tests without assistance. The teachers will be patient with all the students, but these kinds of routines are taken for granted in school after the earliest years.

3) What are some typical changes we can anticipate in our child’s behavior after entering school?

If your child is entering an elementary grade, he may come home tired after a full day of school. This will pass rather quickly, especially if you ensure he gets enough rest at night. At the older grades, he will probably be a bit overwhelmed at first with the difference in the kind of work expected of him and the amount of work required. Again, assuming the admissions process was carefully done and he is in the appropriate grade, this too should pass. He will see his peers coping with the work and he will discover he can do it, too. Another possible change you may see is that your child may seem more independent. Though this may be painful to you as a parent, it is normal and good, if attitudes are still respectful, as we all expect them to be. Finally, it must be said that your child may bring home reports of other kids’ misbehaving. This, too, is normal, as we are all sons of Adam. However, always check out “the rest of the story” with the folks at school. Like you, we are committed to a godly education.

4) What are some of the unique academic aspects of the classical program we should be made aware of?

In the elementary grades, Latin is a subject that may not be studied in a homeschool setting. Some classical schools begin Latin in the third grade, so if your child enters at that point, there should be little problem. If your classical school offers a summer school, Latin, as well as some of the other unique classes, may be offered. This would be a wonderful opportunity to have your child get a less formal beginning to school. The grammar stage will also use a lot of memorization and chanting as a means to teach the students. This may be unfamiliar to you and your family.

Logic is usually taught in the junior-high program, and it is very important that your older student not miss this building block. Again, ask the school about summer school possibilities, or even tutoring. Writing- including correct grammar and spelling – will be very critical to the classical program your child will enter. Plan to see an emphasis on this, as well as reading many titles (including historical biographies and novels), and using possibly a higher level of math and science than many other school programs.

5) Are there any peer problems we should anticipate, since our child is just joining the class, and may be the only homeschooled child?

This is often a concern, but rarely does it develop into a real problem. If our school is all we say it is, and if your child has been lovingly, firmly, and biblically trained, we should have a great time together. Your child should quickly find peers who, though not homeschooled, will become good friends, and will discover they have had many common experiences. Yes, there will likely be bumps and bruises with someone at some point, but that’s life in a fallen world. Part of the benefit of being in a Christian school is the chance to settle those “bumps” in a biblical manner.

6) Does the school have any other advice for us as we consider this possible transition?

Well, since you asked, yes, we do. Sad to say, some homeschoolers put relatively little thought into the long-term educational plans for their children. As a school, we have had to do just the opposite. We have spent much time and effort building a consistent, quality program. Therefore, unlike a homeschool situation, we cannot quickly change certain aspects of the school. That may include even some undesired aspects. Your input, as with all our families, is critical to our success and improvement. We would just ask that you seek to understand that we are a school, and not ask us to change fundamental practices and philosophies we have committed to, and be patient with us as we do seek to make changes where we can.

Finally, we would urge you to look at this transition for the long term. That is, we believe it would be better for your child to come with the intention of completing his classical education, rather come one year, maybe homeschool the next, and perhaps seek to return to school the following year. Our experience has led us to believe this kind of fluctuation does not promote a consistent, solid education of any kind. Please examine your goals for your child carefully, then examine our school goals carefully. We hope they are a good match. When we admit homeschooled students whose parents have very similar goals to ours, those students become some of the best, biblically sound students we graduate! And to all of our joy, “…when they are old, they will not depart from it.”